Graham always knew that his odds of breaking into the majors were long, and he never had a realistic path to winning his Party’s nomination. His plan, instead, was to use the nomination process to make foreign policy a central issue in the Republican primaries and to make sure that his own hawkish views prevailed with whomever the Party nominated.
.. Graham clearly entered this Presidential race to start a fight with the Paul wing of the Party, but Paulism was in decline. In fact, most of Graham’s serious opponents, especially Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie, were already parroting Graham’s views on Obama’s failures and the need for a more interventionist response to the Islamic State, even if they have been coy about sending ground troops in the numbers that Graham has favored.
.. Unlike all of his rivals, Graham saw climate change as a major threat. When we talked in the summer, he mocked the typical Republican response to the issue. “How many times have you heard a Republican say, ‘I’m not a scientist’?” he said. “Okay, I get that, I’m not a scientist either. What makes you think all the scientists are wrong if you’re not one? If you go to ten doctors, and nine of them say, ‘Hey you’re gonna die if you don’t do this,’ and one of them says you’re fine, why would I listen to the one guy when nine guys say, ‘You need to do something or you’re gonna die’?”
But his hawkish stances could also help endear him to a Republican base that may already be skeptical of Mr. Rubio because of his involvement in a failed attempt to overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws.
.. During the question-and-answer portion of his remarks, Mr. Rubio said that there was little difference between his view and that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on the threat posed by Iran — except that Mr. Netanyahu “lives a lot closer to them than I do.”